Time Machine Failure

I got an interesting error message today after trying to use Time Machine for the first time:


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“Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.”

Thanks Apple. That fucking useful…

Why didn’t the error message just say:

“Sorry, something went wrong.”

How about telling what went wrong and how I can fix it?

The help documents for Time Machine are pretty worthless too. ugh… trying again, I guess.

update: looks like searching ‘/var/log/system.log’ for “backupd” with Console.app will get you the error messages that are causing Time Machine to fail. I just found this string “Nov 11 18:35:25 Macintosh-4 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3488]: MDBackupIndexFile returned -1134 for: /Applications/Address Book Exporter.app/Contents/Info.plist, /Volumes/Terra/Backups.backupdb/John Engler’s Computer/2007-11-11-092541.inProgress/3B403D2E-A7F8-40F2-8552-C8FC6E608AF7/Intelligence/Applications/Address Book Exporter.app/Contents/Info.plist” in my log file. So, I’m deleting Address Book Exporter from the Applications folder now. Will try again… thanks to this post in Apple’s Discussion forums for the pointers.


One Response to “Time Machine Failure”  

  1. Gravatar Icon 1 Richard Soderberg

    I saw this error every few hours while my first Time Machine backup was underway. Eventually it finished backing up all 0.5T of my data for the first time. The error has not reoccurred since.

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